


Prairie Wren

by bluetoast



Series: Birds of a Feather [28]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-21 00:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1531106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluetoast/pseuds/bluetoast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary saw many changes in her house after the fire. For five years the house stood empty - until it was renovated and became home to a long line of college girls going to KU. She guarded and took care of all of them - and no girl ever mentioned the house was haunted by a previous occupant. Mary always assumed that her family was together - until two photos in a magazine changed everything.  Now she wants to know what happened to her boys - particularly why her oldest son, Dean - has a different surname.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prairie Wren

The figure had watched, unseen, as men moved about in her home, replacing carpet, updating the paint and wiring, making the home hospitable again. No one had lived in her house for nearly six years. She'd watched as people would turn from the home that she'd adored, she'd watched weeds and crabgrass overtake the lawn, only to die with the seasons and then be buried under the snow and then the cycle would start again. The workers didn't speak of the family moving in, didn't do much more than work and curse. Once or twice the figure had knocked something over – to let the workers know that this wasn't their home. She watched as they cleaned the place up and furniture moved in – second-hand, but very homey and inviting looking. Early on an August morning, the figure heard a gentle rumble of a car and then a flurry of laughter and a moment later, the first of a long line of occupants of number forty-seven Ash Court stepped in the front door. Mary Winchester could not believe what she was witnessing as a total of four college age girls came into her family room, all thrilled and overjoyed and someday, she was certain, to be as close as sisters. This she could handle – these girls she could protect.

The first girl to notice something a little unsettling about the house on Ash Court was a twenty-year old education major named Jennifer. She had taken up residence in the front bedroom, being the only person who didn't mind having an east facing window. Unknown to her, Jennifer had moved into what had once been Dean's bedroom. Mary had chosen Jennifer because she liked children. Having never tried to make direct contact with anyone before, Mary wasn't entirely sure how to go about it – until she noted that Jennifer had a very bad habit of leaving her class ring from high school lying around. That was, until Mary started taking the ring from wherever the girl left it in the house and dropping it next to Jennifer's glasses in the middle of the night. 

Jennifer Barnes knew she wasn't going crazy. The first time her ring showed up on the bedside table, she called it coincidence and she probably hadn't noticed it when she went to bed. The third time it happened, when she knew the last place she'd had her ring was in the kitchen when she'd taken it off to scrub potatoes for dinner, she'd asked her roommates if they'd moved her ring and they'd responded in the negative. “Okay, there has to be a logical reason for this.” She stood up from her desk roughly two weeks after the kitchen to bedroom incident and she went down to the front room and dropped the silver ring in the potted plant that was on the front table. “If it's still there in the morning, I'll just accept the fact I'm imagining things.” 

Mary chuckled unseen, liking the girl more with every day. Instead of taking the ring back to Jennifer's room, since all the other girls were already abed, she took it and set it on the bottom of Jennifer's coffee mug, which was waiting next to the pot for tomorrow morning. Sure enough, when the girl found her keys the next morning, she wasted no time in telling the others that the house was haunted.

*

The first girls to live in the house didn't advertise the fact that Mary was in the house. It something that you didn't talk about with anyone who didn't live in the house. The girls all agreed that Mary Winchester was half playful, half protective. Plenty of boys with bad intentions had found themselves the victims of odd attacks – the most violent being the time Mary jerked the hall rug out from under the feet of some stupid jock who didn't want to accept the fact that his girlfriend, Kelly, had broken up with him. The crash had brought another boy who'd been in the house at the time, out of the room he was in and he'd thrown the guy out of the house. 

Boys never lived in the house on Ash Court. 

Mary was never alone in the home during the summer. Some girls always seemed to stay for the summer semester and work. Even during holidays, international students who were friends with the girls currently living in the home would come to stay. Mary did her best to stay quiet then – she didn't want to run the risk of attracting to much attention. It wasn't until fifteen years after the fire – that something finally set her off.

*

Her name was Allison and she was a tiny scrap of a young woman. She had come to KU on a gymnastics scholarship and practically ate, slept and breathed the sport. Her other passion was scrap-booking. It was a rainy Sunday and Mary had watched all the girls off and on, before all five of them went out for pizza. Allison had spent her day cutting out articles from a few sports magazines, adjusting them on the page, before finally settling on an arrangement and gluing them in. She'd left the book open to the new page open to dry when she'd gone out, giving Mary an unobstructed view of the girl's newest creation. 

There were two photographs, one of a young man, supporting his whole body weight on his arms as he stood upside down on a pair of rings and the second was, she supposed the same man, standing on a podium, his eyes rather wet with a spangled ribbon around his neck, the medal a gleaming silver. Then, in an instant, Mary recognized the face. Though the last time she saw it, his hair had been shaggy and in need of cutting – and his face had still been clinging to baby-fat, she knew, without question that she was looking at _her_ boy. _Her Dean._

That wasn't what set her off – what should have been a joyful moment – _my boy, my boy, look at what my boy has done_ – suddenly turned sour when she saw the headline that accompanied one of the news articles: _Newcomer Coulter Surprises at American Cup._ Coulter? She skimmed the rest of the article, her rage starting to grow. It stated right off the bat that Dean Coulter was the _adopted_ son of Michael and Elisa Coulter – and had been deaf since birth. Here was Dean – with a different name. She needed to know more, more than what the paper was telling her. She flew out of the room, upsetting the desk chair and raced through the house, upending more loose items. She needed _answers._

In the basement, she found that long hidden strongbox full of photographs – where she'd insisted on putting them back when she was alive, in case anything happened. She heaved the box upstairs – no easy feat, even for a ghost – but she was using her rage to keep her focus. 

When the five girls came home – the photos were scattered across the kitchen table and a message had been written on their dry-erase board on the fridge: FIND MY BOYS.

*

It became the mission of the Ash Court Girls – as they collectively called themselves, to find the missing family members. The five who'd been in the house in 1998 worked on contacting the girls who _used_ to live there, all the way back to the original four. No easy task, having to manage through maiden names and so forth. It was agreed though, that given the number of times Mary had helped them all out in various ways – from boyfriends getting too friendly to the time she woke up six girls in 1993 in the middle of the night as a tornado siren was going off – it was the least they could do. But it wasn't like they could just advertise what they were doing either. It was on a sunny March morning in 2000, however, when the first break in the search happened.

*

Dean had wanted to come back to Lawrence, just one last time. He had long since tried to forget about the fire that had killed his mom. Since the men competed on Friday in the gymnastics meet against Kansas, he had most of Saturday off to do as he pleased. Oddly enough, however, he could still remember the way to his old home on Ash Court. It was scary to see how little the house had changed since he saw it last. He stood at the end of the drive, doing his best not to fall apart. The room on the corner, that'd been his – done in blue. Sammy's room had been behind it – where the fire started. The fire that reeked of sulfur – it'd taken him months for someone to understand what he'd tried to tell his dad about the fire. 

He steeled himself up – resolved that the worst that could happen would be that the current occupants slammed the door in his face. He went up the walk and rang the bell. He just hoped that he could speak clearly enough for the people to understand him.

The door swung back and a girl with very straight, very long brown hair looked out at him. “Can I help you?”

“I'm sorry to bother you.” Dean was used to people's eyebrows lifting at the sound of his voice. “I was just in town for a few days – I used to live here and...”

“Holy crap, you're Dean Coulter!” The girl blinked. “Aren't you?”

He frowned. “You know who I am?” 

“Er... it's complicated. One second.” She shut the door and he was left to wonder what was going on. A moment later the door reopened and there were now two girls at the door. 

“Uh, would you please come in?” The new girl asked and they stepped aside to let him enter. When Dean came inside, he caught the smell of flowers, cookies baking and Pine Sol. He swallowed hard as he looked around. He never thought he'd be in this house again. He never really wanted to come back here – but he just needed to see it one last time, so his final memory of the place wouldn't be it going up in flames. Then he caught another scent on the air – soap and sugar. Mom's scent. 

The first girl touched his arm, causing him to turn and look at her. “I'm sorry, forgot to introduce myself...” She held her hand out. “I'm Lisa Braeden and uh...”

Dean looked her over for a moment and smiled “You're very cute.”

“Lisa!” The second girl came into Dean's view so he could read her lips. “You are making a total ass of yourself, you know that, right?” She shook her head. “I'm Rachel Bronte – no relation to the writers.” She shot the other girl a look. “Shit, she didn't tell us what we were supposed to do when...”

“Why are you looking at me? I know I've lived here longer than you but...”

“What's going on?” Dean broke in, starting to feel wholly uncomfortable – and he caught another whiff of that soap-sugar smell. 

Rachel pursed her lips for a moment and then spoke, “uh... if we said we think you're mom is haunting this house, would you think we're crazy?”

Dean blinked at the girl, knowing his eyebrows lifted. “Would you think I'm crazy if I said I believed you?” Somehow, somehow it just made sense. Pastor Jim had told him that spirits were people who couldn't move on – sometimes because of unfinished business. The scent hit him again and he turned towards the direction where it was strongest. 

Lisa took hold of her roommate's arm. “Maybe we should just, I dunno... let him go into the family room and we'll like – leave him alone? If she was pissed, Mary would have already thrown something. Remember what we were told about Jennifer Sorrenburg's boyfriend?”

Rachel nodded. Everyone knew about what happened to that boy. Mary threw him down the stairs when he went upstairs uninvited – and a bottle of GHB had fallen out of his pocket when he landed. “You unplug everything in the family room – I'll tell him.” Her friend nodded and went into the other room. “Uh...” She touched Dean's arm, unsure of exactly how to get his attention. 

“Yes?” Dean gave her a questioning look. 

“Uh, Lisa's going to unplug everything in the family room and then we'd let you go in there and I dunno, Mary never told us what to do if this happened. Lisa and I are going to go upstairs, and don't worry about our other roomies, they all went home for the weekend, so... that okay?”

“You talk very quickly – so I think I got about half of that conversation.” Dean gave the girl a smile. “But I think – that could work.” He watched as Rachel grabbed her friend by the wrist and the two of them raced upstairs. “Girls...” He shook his head and stepped into the family room. It bore little resemblance to the one he vaguely remembered. The couch was fake leather instead of that weird paisley upholstery that could hide stains. The scent suddenly seemed almost overwhelming – and then he felt it. A soft, warm breeze against the back of his neck and he slowly turned the direction it came from. “Momma?”

Suddenly she was just _there_ , standing next to the sideboard. Still in that white nightgown, looking as real and just as he remembered. He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, not sure of what he was supposed to say. What was there to say?

Mary crossed the room and brushed the air next to Dean's face, smiling. “You've learned to talk.” 

“Yes.” He instantly fell back into signing as he spoke – his momma was doing the same. “Are you – okay?”

“I'm fine, Dean.” She smiled. “Look at how big you are. I always knew you were going to be tall.” She wished she could wrap her arms around her boy, hold him close and just – comfort him like she used to. 

“I miss you momma.” Dean sniffled. “I – mo- Elisa -”

“If you call someone else mom now, Dean – I don't mind.” She smiled. Somehow, just seeing him standing there in her family room was enough, “I'm sure she's a very wonderful woman.”

“She's deaf too.” Dean couldn't repress the smile when he said it. “She... understands.”  
Mary's smile strengthened. “How does Sam like that?” And then she saw Dean's face fall.

“Sam's with... John.” Dean took a deep breath, willing himself to keep his tears and his anger at bay. He hated talking about his father. But the reaction he was holding back was suddenly all over his mother's face.

“You mean – he's not with you?” Mary did her best to keep her powers at bay, but in the corner of her eye, she could see a vase starting to shake.

“No, momma.” Dean went straight to signing, in case the girls were listening at the top of the stairs.

Mary's hair flew up around her and eyes flashed. “Your father left you?” 

Dean nodded, suddenly honestly afraid of his mother – his ghost mother – who was going from what was probably playful spirit to full on pissed off spirit in a heartbeat. 

“I should have known.” She backed away, holding herself stiffly– giving Dean the feeling that she was trying to control her powers. 

“I'll find Sammy.” Dean figured he'd find a way to calm her down – they could have a better meeting when he had his brother with him. 

“Please.” A lamp fell to the floor, shattering the bulb. “Just never bring John here. I might destroy the house.”

“I can't promise he won't follow us.” Dean swallowed. “But I won't do it on purpose.” 

“Thank you.” A moment later, she flashed out of the room, leaving Dean alone. 

*  
Mary wasn't as active after Dean left. She still watched and took care of the girls who lived in the house, but now she had something to wait for, instead of endless waiting. Once she saw both of her boys back together – she could let go, she could move on. 

*  
Dean returned to Maryland with a strongbox full of photographs and a new goal added to his list. Find his baby brother. He'd always wanted to find Sammy, but now it wasn't just for himself, but for their mom as well. In the box he found one of the last pictures of him and Sammy that his mom had taken – the date on the back was the Fourth of July. It was of the two of them sleeping on a picnic blanket – he remembered that blanket – it always smelled like liquorice for some reason. He yawned and sat down on his bed to look through his school packet. The competition schedule for next year had been finalized and he scanned it, knowing he'd have to work the meets into his visits to medical schools. Not even halfway down the list was a quad meet against his school, the American School for the Deaf, Washington State, University of Nevada Las Vegas - and hosting was his first choice of schools – _Stanford._ He frowned when he noticed that the date for the meet crossed over with the dates of the Olympic Games in Sydney. Granted, it was a long shot of landing a spot on that team, but still – going to Palo Alto might just be as good as going to Australia.


End file.
